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Nearly done with these playtest notes, following similar threads for the Operative, Solarian, Soldier, and Witchwarper classes, the Barathu ancestry, and guns. In this thread I'll be discussing the Envoy class, and will split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
Most of my playtests took place at levels 1-5, as I ran them mostly using the official Starfinder playtest scenarios and field tests. I ran some playtests at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated those as secondary to the playtest scenarios.
I ran my Envoy with a variety of party compositions, mostly with just other Starfinder classes. I eventually started adding Pathfinder classes into the mix, and treated those playtests as secondary.
I ran my Envoy under different ancestries, as I was playtesting those too.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules. I then started playing with certain parameters, like enemy behavior and compositions or the Envoy's features, and treated those findings as secondary.
I maxed out Charisma, then Dexterity, then Constitution and Wisdom. This ended up not changing much even when picking leadership styles that would normally have favored Strength (From the Front) or Intelligence (Infosphere Director), and I'll talk a bit more about those in detail.
I tried a variety of guns on the Envoy, eventually settling on the pre-errata seeker rifle. More so than on other classes, I got to experiment with advanced weapons, and tried out the artillery laser and card slinger weapons.
TL;DR: I ran the Envoy many times mainly through the official playtest scenarios at their low level range, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. As I put the class through the same encounters, I altered some parameters over time to see how they would affect its performance.
Directives:
Directives are the main new mechanic the Envoy introduces, and so merit their own section:
I very much enjoyed being able to deploy buffs for my whole team, and once I had access to multiple directives I enjoyed the choice of buffs to apply.
With that said, Get 'Em often felt like the best directive to use in the vast majority of cases, and often my turns ended up turning into a routine of Get 'Em + Strike x2. It's not that I had to Lead by Example each time, so much that that sequence of actions was often so much better than any alternative that it simply became the default.
In general, the action cost of using a directive and then Leading By Example each time a turn felt really costly and felt like it dampened the Envoy's flexibility a fair bit, while making the class quite repetitive (this I think is a recurring issue with martial classes in the Starfinder 2e playtest). Because of this, it also meant I didn't really feel any great desire to use costlier actions to Lead By Example, like Area/Auto-Fire with Guns Blazing, nor did I want to deploy two directives in one turn.
Due to the above, it also meant Infosphere Director secretly became the strongest subclass at level 6: although the reliance on Intelligence-based skills didn't work super-well with the Envoy, with Digital Diversion feeling completely pointless on a Charisma-based class, being able to Lead by Example using Recall Knowledge mean that thanks to the Automatic Knowledge feat, I could start Leading by Example as a free action, a significant action economy benefit over other classes. This felt more like an exploit than intended behavior.
I appreciate that Paizo is planning to give the Envoy's subclasses each their own directive, as I feel the class could use a much bigger choice of directives at low levels. I'd even support taking other directives besides Get 'Em! out of the class's core features and making them into feats.
I was afraid that Get'Em's circumstance penalty to AC would be made redundant by the off-guard condition, but enemies didn't find themselves off-guard all that often, unlike in Pathfinder, so the benefit was relevant most of the time. When I did integrate Pathfinder content, however, it did often become subsumed by off-guard, so there is a compatibility risk to the current implementation of the mechanic, though not necessarily an issue internal to just Starfinder.
Get 'Em!'s wording on Lead by Example is ambiguously written, in that the flavor text states the attack reveals a weak point, implying that the bonus only applies on subsequent hostile actions, yet the mechanic seems to intend to grant the bonus to damage rolls on that same attack, which is also how I've ruled it. I also assume the bonus to damage rolls applies to all damage rolls, not just damage rolls from attacks, at which point the mechanic may need to specify that the bonus applies only once on effects that damage an enemy multiple times, otherwise this would add significantly more damage to persistent damage rolls.
Another issue I took with Get 'Em's LBA benefit is that it only applies to dealing damage, which means using an Act of Leadership that deals no damage (i.e. most of them) doesn't work super well. By contrast, virtually every other directive's LBA mechanic is more open-ended and works better with Acts of Leadership, so I feel the directive could be adjusted a bit to be less restrictive.
Show 'Em What You Got!, in the few times I used it, didn't really feel like an interesting choice of directive alongside others so much as just a big power button you'd press at the start of every fight. It just makes everyone stronger in a way that's fairly predetermined by their class, which is made all the more obvious by how the Envoy themselves can't opt into defending or spellcasting if they want to Lead by Example, even if they archetype into something that would let them defend better or cast spells.
I liked the options of directives to boost my party's Speed and Seek checks as feats, though a +5 circumstance bonus on Search High and Low is excessive and I don't think should exist in 2e (this isn't 1e, and a +4 is already a massive increase). Take 'Em Alive! didn't provide a benefit that I found relevant in the playtest scenarios, but in my Pathfinder experience I can think of many situations where this could've been useful. My one issue here is that three directives is a very small number when these are meant to be the Envoy's bread-and-butter mechanic in encounters, and I think there ought to be many more choices of these.
Later on in my playtests, I experimented with turning directives into stances with a few adjustments, and this pretty much resolved the biggest issues I took with their action cost. Although my Envoy couldn't deploy multiple directives in one turn (which I found perfectly fine, as I didn't find spamming directives to be very interesting), the class generally felt much more flexible and free to act, with the subclasses shining more often by letting the Envoy Lead by Example in a greater variety of ways while doing more on their turn (and, importantly, playing more differently from one turn to the next). I would very much recommend implementing directives in this way to unclog the Envoy's action economy.
TL;DR: Directives I think are a solid core mechanic to a martial support class that let the Envoy buff their team, with an interesting aspect of opting into even greater benefits. My main issue with them as implemented now is that needing to spend an action on a directive every turn makes the Envoy far more repetitive and rigid than they ought to be. When I experimented with making directives work like stances, this eliminated those action economy issues and made the Envoy's turns much more dynamic and flexible overall.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis and its feats for readability:
For starters, the Envoy has a lot of features, only very few of which felt truly necessary to the class. A lot of these were number boosters around Charisma checks that I didn't get to use that often, but they took up a lot of space on the class's feature list, and I think obscured the stuff that made them truly unique (namely Adaptive Talent, which I'll get to below).
Practice/Savvy/Effortless Influencer felt like one such unnecessary line of features, and stacking charges of a per-day ability felt like a 1e-ism to me when the standard in 2e is to simply change the mechanic's frequency to something more frequent. I have no real desire to track a resource on a martial class, and in the few times this kicked in, I mainly just spammed Demoralize checks at close range in encounters. If this is to stay, I'd rather make this a feat chain that lets you go from a once-per-day use to once per hour or even every 10 minutes.
Hidden/Indiscernible Agenda also felt like an unnecessary line of features, and also felt like very 1e-style design where eventually, rolls just cease to matter because of how hard these features alter degrees of success. 2e really does not need this degree of heavy-handedness to make a character good at being deceptive, and I don't think even the Envoy needs this when Deception is but one of several Charisma skills they can take.
Wise to the Game is, similarly, yet another number booster that that I found unnecessary and excessive when paired up with the class's already legendary Perception (which I also didn't find all that relevant to the class).
Silver Tongue uses this design present in other mechanics where it grants you a base benefit, then an even greater benefit if you have the base benefit already, and to me this just looked like a very complicated way of saying the player gets yet another charge of Practiced Influencer, except the effect has no synergy with Effortless Influencer despite working in almost the exact same way. This is just messy design, and I feel ought to be pruned from the Envoy's overloaded feature list.
Size Up and Saw it Coming felt extraneous to most Envoy builds I was picking. It felt very similar to the Investigator's Pursue a Lead, which didn't fit the flavor of every Envoy, but also often didn't come up in the playtest scenarios I ran, despite taking up so much space. These features I think could just have been feats, with adjustments to the feats that rely on them.
In spite of all of this feature overload, two other feature lines stuck out to me as genuinely interesting, namely Adaptive Talent and Improvised Mastery/Legendary Improvisation: put together, these features made my Envoy flexible with their skills in ways no other skill-heavy class really approached, as they could swap out their feats and become good at skills they weren't normally great at. I feel these features ought to be combined and given much more space in the Envoy's core power budget, so that the class has much more freedom to swap out their skill proficiencies and skill feats from one day to the next.
On a more minor note, I also feel the Envoy's proficiencies were somewhat overloaded. Giving the class legendary Will saves is definitely appropriate, but I also don't think the class needed to be so durable as to also get up-to-master Reflex saves, nor did they really need up-to-legendary Perception. They're not the only overstatted Starfinder class by any stretch, but I do believe that in addition to just normalizing those classes' stats, they ought to have weaker overall defenses than their Pathfinder counterparts.
I found most of the subclasses useful in differentiating my Envoys a bit, though mainly when their Acts of Leadership kicked in, which is why I'd support making those core to the subclasses at level 1. None of the subclasses really made me change my attributes, as I felt pretty locked into Charisma then Dex/Con/Wis, and this extended even to From the Front, which did not actually have me leading from the front so much as just using a shield with a one-handed gun.
As mentioned above Infosphere Director starts out as an entirely redundant subclass (you can already Create a Diversion using Deception much more accurately) that only becomes good via an exploit, i.e. using Automatic Knowledge for free-action Lead by Examples at 6th level onwards. This subclass needs to be touched up a little, in my opinion, and Acts of Leadership I think need a general provision of requiring the player to spend at least one action in order to Lead by Example, just to nip this kind of exploit in the bud.
Although I didn't feel like the Envoy was a major damage-dealer, nor did I believe they were meant to be, I still felt like they dealt solid baseline damage purely thanks to Get 'Em!'s circumstance bonus to damage. In an environment where even an Operative can end up dealing a piddly 4 damage on a crit, every +1 counts even on damage rolls.
In a similar vein, the Envoy is in an interesting space where they're much more able to opt into advanced guns than any other Starfinder martial class (Operatives would have to use them at a lower proficiency rank and sacrifice their exceptional accuracy, AoE advanced weapons are generally not great to use even on the Soldier, and the Solarian doesn't really interact with the game's weapon selection at all), but at the same time are much less dependent on specific weapons than other classes. When I used a pistol, the lower damage die didn't feel like it made a huge difference thanks to Get 'Em! contributing a large portion of my damage on a hit. This is a nice little bit of flexibility on a martial class that isn't as heavily focused on weapons as the other Starfinder martials.
TL;DR: Adaptive Talent and the Envoy's ability to become good at a skill that's needed in the moment are standout features that I think make the class shine as a skill-user in a manner completely different from Pathfinder's Investigator and Rogue. On the flipside, the class's core progression is ridiculously overloaded with extraneous, number-boosting features that I found added little to the class and felt more like they belonged in 1e than 2e. I would much prefer to give center stage to the class's directives and skill-based adaptability from level 1 onwards, and leave the rest either as feats or just prune them completely.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-4 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
In general, I had a blast selecting and using the Envoy's feats. Feats like Quip and Not in the Face! felt extremely flavorful and appropriate to use, while also feeling both mechanically solid and just plain fun. Although some effects have precedent in Pathfinder, like Watch Out!, simply the naming and flavoring of these effects went a long way towards illustrating how the Envoy would apply these benefits.
The one real criticism I had was that Acquire Asset felt essential in order to use Size Up in a regular encounter, as I wasn't going to be researching mooks. This to me reinforced the notion that Size Up ought to be a feat line, rather than a core class feature, and I even feel Acquire Asset could be the main feat, with other feats then giving the Envoy more out-of-combat benefits.
TL;DR: I found the Envoy's feats to be tremendously flavorful, balanced in my opinion, and fun to use. They made the class very supportive, canny, and nimble overall, reinforcing their role nicely, and the naming and flavoring of the feats I found was brilliant and added significantly to the joy of selecting them. Aside from Acquire Asset feeling essential to benefit consistently from Size Up (and this I think is more an issue with Size Up, which I'd find more appropriate as a feat than as a core class feature), all the feats I used felt solid.
The overall TL;DR from all this is that my experience of the Envoy was really positive overall. The class is by no means perfect, and I think is currently held back by repetitive action taxes on directives along with a serious amount of feature overload, but the Envoy nonetheless stands out for their team support capabilities and their skill-based adaptability, and so in a way that makes them distinct from any other class in 2e. I'm glad Paizo is giving the Envoy more directives, as that I think is the way to go, and I would strongly advocate for making directives work like stances to ease the action cost, while pruning most of the class's core features in favor of making their ability to swap out skill feats and maybe even skill proficiencies on the fly their other big selling point.